Financial Transparency Coalition

I’m pretty confident you won’t have read it, but this week's edition of Transfer Pricing Week saw Vodafone’s tax director, John Connors, publicly enter the debate regarding Christian Aid’s campaign for country-by-country reporting. For some time now we have been talking with Vodafone about tax and development and trying to convince it that it should get on top of this crucial issue. And Vodafone has acknowledged that we have ‘had some interesting discussions.’ This week, that conversation went public – and this is something we welcome. We are campaigning for transparency after all. Connors said in the article that ‘country-by-country reporting is a little misguided’ suggesting...

On September 11, 2001, I was in London. The television images of massive destruction and certain death were no less real for being an ocean away. My wife, departing that morning but turned back to London in mid flight, could not grasp what she was hearing until she, too, saw the falling towers of the World Trade Center and the hole blown into the Pentagon and learned of the flight that went down in Pennsylvania. The next day John Keegan, my favorite historian of World War II, had a piece in the Daily Telegraphspeculating on the things America...

Last week, the World Bank unveiled a major initiative to make their funding more transparent.  Through the new World Bank Finances portal, vast amounts of information about the inner workings of the Bank's finances are now made easily accessible.  This includes information about specific funds that members are supporting, and the disbursement and repayment status of thousands of projects around the world.  Tools are provided to allow members of the public to comment on specific elements of the data, as well as to download datasets specifically catered to their needs.  The data is remarkably up-to-date, often covering information as recent as...

WASHINGTON, DC – One year out from passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and three months after it was supposed to come into effect, a key anti-corruption and transparency measure—the Cardin-Lugar provision (Section 1504)—is still sitting on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) drafting board. The provision to require oil, gas, and mineral companies to disclose payments made to foreign governments is considered an historic move towards shedding light on the operations of a multi-billion dollar industry.